


Riddle - Postscript

by AxeMeAboutAxinomancy



Category: Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman, Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Apologetic Sherlock Holmes, Deleted Scenes, Established Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, M/M, Missing Scene, POV John Watson, Reunions, Reunited and It Feels So Good, Sequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-07-02 21:23:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15804846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AxeMeAboutAxinomancy/pseuds/AxeMeAboutAxinomancy
Summary: What happened right after the end ofThe Riddle?





	Riddle - Postscript

**Author's Note:**

> I started a sequel to [The Riddle](http://archiveofourown.org/works/839048), called The Hymn, in 2014. I... very much doubt it will ever be finished. As with Unforeseen Consequences, I had just a lot of half-developed ideas and plenty of optimism driving it. And then, it got so much harder for me to stay in love with the show. I don't know if I can ever get back to that feeling. But I wrote this reunion scene back then, and I feel that it ought to see the light of day. Despite the tags, it's not strictly 'deleted' or 'missing', but it's pretty close.

_He smashed open the egg, and let John Watson out._

***

I did not know _what_ had happened.

When I went to sleep on the sofa, I was done-up by a long day - the sort of day that seemed far too full of things to have had only twenty-four hours in it. Holmes was on to some new experimental process and had declined to talk about it, probably because he was uncertain of success, and so I had undertaken some of the legwork - so to speak - for an ongoing case. It was not a very glamourous one, but it earned us a very useful stipend paid by a duchess for whom 'More Money Than Sense' could well have been a family motto. Holmes disdained these concerns, but I could not afford to do so. Miraculous as the things the inventing magician made were, and oh they _were_ \- the materials were ruinously expensive.

Legwork was something of a misnomer of course, particularly when it was myself. My cane did as much walking as I did, and I and the cane rested in the back of a cab as much as possible. Even so, my leg did do work and it was not up to very much of the task. It hurt. I was tired.

I had a little nap, with the intention of sleeping for an hour or two at the longest.

I awoke three years later.

(Though I did not know that part at first. )

I awoke on the table, stark naked, and the sitting-room appeared to have _exploded_ , glass everywhere and furniture and machines and shelves and all in chaos, overturned, destroyed. Several windows had been broken out.

And Sherlock Holmes, openly weeping, stood with his hands pressed to his mouth as he stared at me. Tears dripped down onto his fingers.

He was wearing two rings.

I moved my own left hand and felt the strange absence there.

There was another strange absence, but I had had no chance to notice that yet.

I sucked in my breath as I sat up, pushing against the table, and cut myself on a fragment of glass. _"Damnation!_ Holmes - what in the name of hell have you done _now?"_

I could not even _imagine_.

Holmes stared, his hands slowly dropping their defensive position before his mouth; I had never seen such a look on that face. It was more shocking than any of the chaos that I was able to see in the room. That smooth, beautiful, arrogant face looked half-crumpled by the forces of joy and fear and guilt.

"Are you all right?" I reached out, aching at that look, forgetting everything else in the need to respond to it, to do something about it. "For God's sake what's _happened?_ "

Holmes flew at me and hauled me off the table, onto my feet; I cried out in surprise as he embraced me, and tensed in expectation of agony as my full weight bore down on the wrong leg.

But it did _not_ hurt.

Surely at any moment it was going to - ?

_"John,"_ Holmes was saying, or trying to say - his voice struggling in his throat. Wet fingers cupped my face and the lips on mine were salty with tears.

Then Holmes fell down on his knees and wrapped his arms round my waist, pressed his face against my belly like a child clinging to its mother, and shook with silent sobs, so hard it shook us both.

My mind spinning uselessly in confusion, I cradled that dark head against me and stared down, eyes moving over the grey scattered there.

_What on earth happened?_

"Sherlock," I said, in my quietest, calmest tones, as though I were gentling a horse; "Sherlock - " I stroked my fingers through his hair, waiting patiently, as though this were a thing that happened sometimes and had only to be waited out, like a sudden summer storm.

It had _never_ happened before. But that in itself was a common feature of the events that surrounded my brilliant spouse. Things that never had happened before happened around us - and sometimes _to_ us - with astonishing regularity.

"Pray stop now, _stop_." One hand still on his head, I let the other fall to his shoulder and grasped it firmly. "Pull yourself together. _Sherlock!_ I don't understand what's happened, and - and I am _naked_ for some reason, and - where is my walking stick - ?" I did not see it by the sofa where I had laid it down, close to where my hand had been.

"I am sorry," he said, his voice muffled against me.

"Never mind, get up now and help me find my - "

He did get up then, but grasped my shoulders and looked down into my face. His own still looked so strange, distorted, his pale eyes wide and his thin face streaked with tears.

"I got rid of it," he said, "you didn't need it any more."

"What do you mean?" But as we stood thus, with him leaning on me, and myself with no support, I felt again the absence of pain as I stood, symmetrical. Not strong, perhaps, not yet, but _not in pain._

I do not know if I am able to explain what that was like. How many years I had endured, with no prospect of relief save the temporary sort in opiates or palliative magic, which can be nearly as deleterious to the health. I had little to look forward to but many more years of the same, in which the temporary measures would grow less and less effective, however little I liked to use them in the first place.

The lack of pain - it was a buoyancy inside me that changed everything. It was a marvel. I was _literally standing on my own two feet._

It was _miraculous._

"You did this," I said, and for some reason he flinched back at the words, but reassured by the obvious joy in my voice and upon my face, he relaxed once more, though hesitantly.

"Yes," he said, and felt in his pocket for something. He held it out in his palm. A small object, like a pebble - A bullet. _The_ bullet.

I pressed my hand against the place in my thigh where it had been, the locus of pain that had ruled my life since that day at Maiwand Pass. That cursed thing that could not be removed. It was gone from me. It was there in his hand.  
Then I took up his other hand, his left, and kissed it.

"You are a wonder," I said. "You will never stop amazing me."

He did not say anything to this, just gazed down into my face.

His hand in mine reminded me - I could feel the doubled weight of two rings. I looked down at them. "Why are you wearing...?"

He fumbled to take them off - his own and then mine. He offered it back to me with a trembling hand.

I stared at it, not comprehending, and when I did not take it he took up my hand and put it on my finger himself.

"Well. I _did_ feel naked without that," I said, and laughed. He smiled a little.

I continued, "But why _did_ you have it? And where are my clothes, really now. What were you _doing_ while I was - " ('Asleep', I was going to say.)

But I stopped. This silence - from _him_ \- when he should by all rights have been preening and crowing - could not but seem ominous.

"Why aren't you telling me what happened?" I looked at the grey hair that had not been there this morning. I tried to guess. "Have... you discovered time travel after all?"

His expression changed at once into something much more comprehensible. "Oh Watson, how many times must I say, time travel is nothing more than a childish fantasy - "

"I am going to get dressed now," I said, "and you'll tell me when you're ready, then."

I went to the bedroom door - how strange to navigate this familiar room without the familiar walking stick - and had just taken hold of the handle when he said,

"Your things - are not there."

"What?" I turned to stare at him. "Why?"

"I thought you were dead," he said faintly.

Yes, I had guessed that - I must have frightened him for a moment. He must have thought I was dead for a moment. Else why did he cry and cling to me as he had? Why was his manner so stricken?

Something serious had happened. I was not prepared to grapple with it naked. I opened the bedroom door, took his dressing-gown from where it hung on the hook and put it on, though it was too long for me.

The bedroom was astonishingly clean. I had never seen it so.

All of my things?

I looked back at Holmes and the destroyed sitting room.  Then I said, "Come in here with me."

I sat down on our bed and looked up at him.

"Explain this now," I said. "No time travel, but your hair has turned grey since this morning?"

"We _have_ both travelled in time," he said, "myself in the usual way, one weary day following the next. You... you have leaped _over_ that time by remaining in stasis. What you think of as this morning was - more than three years ago for me."

He showed me his hand, and I could see the indentations of long wear on his ring finger. His own ring was now settled where it should be, but it had left a mark higher up towards the knuckle.

"I've worn your ring longer than you have," he said.

And then he told me what he had done.  (One of the things he had done.) He told me how he had tried to remove the bullet while I was sleeping, and that I had disappeared.

When I understood it, that he had thought me dead not for a moment but for _years_ \- I wept, for a moment. Absurd that this distressed him.

"You truly - You had no awareness of it? You never knew - "

"No, I lay down to sleep and awoke on the table - "

We were talking across each other's words, in a parody of the excitement of a good puzzle or invention.

"It was wrong, it was monstrous of me - "

"But you meant well, of course you - "

"You should be angry with me, you should be furious, it was unforgivable - "

"But, Sherlock. It worked."

He stopped talking, wonder of wonders, and stared at me.

"What you were trying to do. It _worked_." I was not in pain! It had been a success.

"But," he said, and then could not go on, and I had to remind myself again that he really had thought me _dead_. He had thought my body vapourised, dispersed; I had left my clothes and my ring and the bullet behind. He thought he had _killed_ me.

"How did I end up on the table then?"

"You were in a sort of egg," Holmes said, sounding distracted. "A crystal. It was on the table when I realised you were in it."

An egg. "How did you realise?"

"You were trying to hatch out."

I did not understand.

"As... in your letter."

"My letter?"

"The one you left."

For a moment I truly did not know what he meant. Letter? Had I left a letter... But then I remembered what he was talking about.

"Do you mean the letter I hid in the brass orrery?" I felt a faint stirring of outrage as he nodded. _I hid that letter inside the planet Cronus._ That letter was intended - he was only ever supposed to read it if -

Oh.

Yes.

"I wrote that," I said, "on the day after we were married."

"I found it," he said, "on the day after you hid it."

I made an exasperated noise.

"Well, really, my dear, even I know 'the rings of Cronus' as a literary reference. Your sentimental thinking - "

I pulled him to sit down beside me and shut him up with a kiss.

After a bit I said, "So you read my letter."

"Yes."

"Well - " How strange to feel embarrassment now. We rose from this bed together this very morning. _Three years since._ "That was what you were supposed to do. Even if you did read it early." I always knew that to be a possibility, thus my attempts to check it with warnings written at the top.

"You apologised to me," he said. "To _me_. For what? You have never done anything wrong - and I have, John, I have done disastrously _bad_ things without you - "

"I'm sorry," I started to say, but he interrupted me, "Great God! Don't say it again - "

I spoke over this, firmly, "- _sorry that it happened_ , that you suffered so. If you _had_ asked me - I would have said yes. I think you knew that."

That did not make it right, of course. Even he knew it did not. But _I_ did not feel anger at what he had done to me. I felt the joyful uplift of vanished pain. I felt grateful.

"And I think I explained myself in my letter. Why I was saying I was sorry. For wasting time that we could have been together." For the first time, I was able to just twist my body towards him, put my arm round his waist, climb up to tip him back.

"Oh," he said, because just this once he was slower than I was to realise something: My limits of position had been rescinded. I could move however I wanted.

He looked up at me, his eyes were wide and dark and he looked lost and hungry.

"I missed you so much," he said. "I think it drove me mad. Perhaps I'm mad now. John, are you really here?"

"I am really here," I said, and I did my best to prove it.


End file.
